by James C. Rinaman Jr.
On June 2, Jim Rinaman marked 50 years of service to the Marks Gray firm in Jacksonville. Rinaman earned his bachelor’s degree in 1955 from the University of Florida and received his bachelor of laws in 1960. His career has been with Marks Gray. He served as president of The Jacksonville Bar Association as well as The Florida Bar, the Florida Defense Lawyers Association, and the Association of Defense Trial Lawyers. Rinaman wrote a series of columns about the practice of law. The third is today and the last will be published in the coming weeks.
In 1968, Article V of the new Florida Constitution was amended to abolish the hodgepodge of small claims, civil court of record, circuit court, justice of the peace and municipal courts, and replace it with a three-tier system of county judges, circuit judges and appeals court judges.
Many justices of the peace were not lawyers and all of them were grandfathered in as county judges. with a special training session to teach them the fundamentals of the law. Counties with a population less than 40,000 were still allowed to have non-lawyer county judges because most of those counties had no lawyers.
Before 1977, all judges were elected and Joe Boyd, a 30-year Dade County commissioner, was elected to the Supreme Court of Florida, although he had not practiced law for many years.
In 1970, Chief Justice James Atkins was scheduled to speak to The Jacksonville Bar at the Roosevelt Hotel Ballroom on the subject of new rules, but at the last minute sent Joe Boyd, who had just joined the court.
Boyd, ever the glib politician, told us he knew he was supposed to speak about new rules but that he really didn’t know anything about them, and thought we would like to hear how it was to be a county commissioner for 30 years and then become a justice of the Florida Supreme Court. He summed that up by saying there really was not much difference, except you begin wearing a robe.
He demonstrated that outlook during his tenure on several occasions, including accepting an ex parte brief, which he flushed down the toilet when asked about it. This was an era of bad politics and bad conduct among our Supreme Court justices, several of whom, including David McCain, were indicted for bribery.
In 1976, Florida adopted the Missouri Plan for selection of appellate judges with a nominating commission, appointed by The Bar and the governor, to recommend the three best applicants to the governor for appointment. I served on the First District Court of Appeal nominating commission from 1977-80 and as chair in 1979. For the first time, women and black lawyers applied for appointment to the court, some of whom we felt were in the top three, but not as good as the top two. We decided the system required us to pick the top three and leave it up to the governor to apply any political or social influence he deemed appropriate.
There were very few women lawyers before 1960. When The Florida Bar published a book about woman lawyers in the 1990s, I discovered that Marks Gray had hired a female lawyer in 1917 who stayed with them about four years. We hired our next female lawyer in 1976 and have added quite a few since then The best advice I have heard for female lawyers came from Pat Seitz, then a partner in a large Miami law firm, and destined to be the first woman president of The Florida Bar in 1993.
At the 1982 Bar convention, Pat addressed several hundred women lawyers on a panel that included Janet Reno and several other successful women lawyers, telling them they should strive to be a “lawyer,” not a “woman lawyer.”
In 1977, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote the opinion in Bates v. Arizona, holding that lawyer advertising was protected speech and could not be prohibited by The Bar. Interestingly, several years later he addressed the ABA House of Delegates admonishing them to be professional and not engage in advertising just because it was legal.
The Florida Bar has struggled valiantly to regulate lawyer advertising on a slippery slope that now includes national television and magazine advertising, which violates The Florida Bar rules, but cannot be controlled by them.
We also have advertising by nonlawyers to go online for legal forms in all areas of the law for do-it-yourself legal projects, which again, because of their national nature, cannot be regulated by The Florida Bar.
In the 1960s, Berney’s Restaurant (“The man in green”) at Forsyth and Laura streets on the first floor of the Elks Building was the place lawyers gathered for lunch. Berney wore a green suit and hat and served nothing but green food and drinks, including beer and martinis on St. Patrick’s Day. In the summer most lawyers wore seersucker suits (“the courthouse pajamas”) and members of the Bedell firm were famous for their boater straw hats. If you needed to talk to another lawyer you would wait until after lunch to call because you were likely to see him at Berney’s. Lawyers who did not have a court proceeding in the afternoon might have two or three martinis at lunch, and we young lawyers often stopped on the way home for a few drinks at the Towne Pump in San Marco or the Fiesta Bar in Southlake Plaza.
In the 1960s, Jacksonville Bar lunches were attended by about 250 of our 600 members. Now about 200 of the 2,500 members attend.